Accepted paper:

What is "popular Frazerism" and how is it at work in Europe today? Conceptualising re-enchantment, ritualisation, and heritage-making from a different perspective

Authors:

Alessandro Testa (Charles University, Prague)

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will present the notion of “popular Frazerism” as I have developed and used it in my recent research. The ethnographic evidence will be drawn from my intensive fieldworks on festivals and other “immaterial” heritages in some European rural or semi-urban areas.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I will present the notion of "popular Frazerism" as I have developed and used it in my recent research. The ethnographic evidence will be drawn from my intensive fieldworks on festivals and other "immaterial" heritages in rural or semi-urban areas in Italy (2010-2011), Czech Republic (2013-2014) and Catalonia (2016-2017).
Popular Frazerism, as I conceive it, can be thought of as a particular cultural modality of "past presencing", one that seems to be at work transversally in Europe. As a phenomenon related with the imagination and the experience of the past, but also with religious or pseudo-religious social facts, it is strongly connected with processes such as re-enchantment, ritualisation, and heritage-making, all of which are at the centre of the panel's focus.